Grayscale
by smileinthedark
Summary: Human AU. "He understands, now, Liza's desire to tattoo her husband, to brand something into his white, aristocratic skin and bring him down to earth with the rest of them." PruAus. Sorta. Warning: mentions of sex  in the form of Gilbert's fantasies.


**A/N: "Evoke a spot in new York City" became "write a Hetalia AU in New York City." This is the result.  
><strong>**Warnings: Man-on-man sex in the form of Gilbert's fantasies.  
>Disclaimer: Characters not mine.<strong>

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It has always been one of his fantasies to screw a married man – a fantasy revealed only a handful of times to the one-night-stands he's picked up after five and a half shots too many or an occasional unnamed pill laid out neatly next to his glass in the shadier clubs he frequents. The makeshift lovers who actually hear his desperate, mumbled confessions – the ones not drowning in post-orgasmic bliss – usually laugh a breathless, tired laugh.

"We all want that, Gil, sweetie," one particularly affectionate tranny tells him, smoothing down Gilbert's sliver-dyed hair with a delicate hand. Gil wonders and wants to ask, to argue with this young blond he'd found shining brilliantly against a backdrop of cheap neon signs advertising PEEP SHOWS and XXX TOYS and any number of one night attempts at salvation.

He wants to argue that _no_, his desire isn't the same as everyone else's. This deepest-darkest-secret is something different from the cheap fantasies that buoy late night conversations in the innumerable bars that line the city streets all the way into Bed-Stuy, where Gil has set up more or less permanent residence. Instead, he groans, shifting into a more comfortable position on the ratty mattress.

When Gil wakes, the blond is gone, leaving nothing in his wake but an empty space on the bed and a name and number hastily scrawled on the inside of a book of matches. Pressing his forehead to the cold glass of the room's only window, Gil decides he could probably use the matches.

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Gil hates winter. This he's decided a long time ago, but he reiterates the thought to his boss as he shoves his nose into the thin scarf wrapped loosely around his neck. The burly man either does not hear him or chooses to ignore his complaint as it is chased out of the air by the whipping wind. With one strong arm, Sadiq lifts the metal gate, muscles barely straining – clearly visible, as he wears no jacket, and Gil has to wonder how the man can withstand the cold - and he hoists it above his head, collecting the padlocks and jerking his head roughly in Gil's direction.

Gil follows, trudging up the stairs to their dingy little supply shop. Vaguely, he wonders if Sadiq realizes how dirty it is, how the blue tiles have turned a dusty grey, and how occasionally a roach or rat would scurry across the shop. Gil decides he probably doesn't, and even if he does, what would it matter?

It's past noon before Gil hears the first customer of the day arrive, and the jingle of the bell at the entrance almost disorients him, unfamiliar as it is. He continues shelving the boxes of needles and inks without pause; the person trudging up the stairs with heavy, weary footsteps can only be one of two people who still retrieve their orders in person, and Dorin only comes at night.

Gil still does not understand why a tattoo artist from the East Village comes all the way to 40th Street for supplies, but Sadiq and Gil alike are grateful for Liza's business. When she reaches the top of the stairs, she addresses them with a smile and a hello in heavily accented English – years in the States have done little to diminish her Hungarian lilt – and she weaves her way around the boxes at Gil's feet to where Sadiq sits, reading a Turkish paper.

As Liza passes him, Gil catches a glimpse of the two thin tattoos that snake up the insides of her arms. He has never asked about them, just as he has never asked about the tribal pattern that stretches across Sadiq's shoulder, but Liza is proud, and takes great pleasure in explaining. _**Ha rövid a kardod, toldd meg egy lépéssel **_runs the length of her right arm, _**Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis **_up her left, both the Hungarian and Latin laying bare her fighting spirit and raw will. Had she lived in a different time, she explained to him once, she would have been a warrior; she would have been on the front lines and stormed Burgundy, Saxony, and Provence.

Gil thinks that perhaps he can see the warrior if he looks hard enough, but as Liza chats amicably with Sadiq at the counter all he can see is her with her dull brown hair and her frayed skirt and her tired eyes and her winding tattoos. Whatever warrior might have been in her blood has since abandoned her, and the unbidden thought of mourning this lost fighter comes to Gil. He ignores it and walks to the adjacent room, where Liza's order is ready and waiting up against the window.

He presses his forehead to the glass on a whim, and is rewarded with a shiver up his spine and he shudders, but does not pull away. Instead, he pulls his scarf up tighter around his nose and peers out the window at the bundled-up locals maneuvering around the piles of blackened snow and stalled cars on 8th Avenue, and the lost tourists who've wandered just a little too far from the bright artificial lights of Times Square for comfort. Winter in New York is ugly, Gil can't help but think as his eyes sweep over the block below, looking as it does like a faulty grayscale print of the city, bright reds and blues standing out unnaturally against the accepted drabness of the buildings.

In his observation, Gil almost misses the man directly beneath him, leaning against the shop's doorframe, a singular, stationary figure in an endless whirling sea of unfamiliar faces. Though Gil has never before seen him standing out there in the doorway, he recognizes the man as Liza's husband even though he's not once entered the store and everything Gil knows about him he's learned from Liza's idle chatter.

Rod is an aspiring concert pianist. He almost made it in Carnegie Hall – _'he has more than enough talent, they don't know what they're talking about, rejecting him like that'_ – but ended up a piano tutor instead. He teaches schoolchildren on the Upper East Side. His mother moved back to Austria after her husband died. Rod is short for Roderich, but he much prefers to be called Rod. Liza has wanted to tattoo him since she met him – _'he has the perfect skin for it, and a G-cleft would suit him well' _– but he vehemently refuses.

He looks terribly out of place there in the doorway between the Subway and the bootleg sports store, and Gil has the sudden urge to call out to him and ask why he seems to prefer standing alone in the bitter cold to his wife's company in the warmth of the shop. He almost does, but remembers that there is a window separating them, and that Rod wouldn't be able to hear him anyway.

Rod shifts against the doorframe below, and the movement gives Gil a clear view of high cheekbones and flushed cheeks and glasses perched atop a pointed nose. His long coat is pressed and buttoned all the way up to his throat, where it meets a white scarf, and Gil is suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to dishevel this man, to mess up his hair and knock those glasses askew. Gil wants to grab Rod – no, Roderich, elegant, uptight Roderich – by the wrist and drag him into a back alley and strip him of his dignity and his false upper-class airs. He wants to see the pianist break at the seams on his ratty mattress in a tiny apartment on Greene Street, shivering with cold and need and bare human _want_. He wants to see that sure, upright spine twisting and arching under his rough blue-collar hands, and he wants Roderich to pant and scream and forget all about Liza and their future 2.1 children and their standard, normal life.

He understands, now, Liza's desire to tattoo her husband, to brand something into his white, aristocratic skin and bring him down to earth with the rest of them. Ignoring another flare of violent desire, Gil grabs the two boxes with Liza's name on them and brings them to her. Beaming, she thanks him, and Gil is struck with the urge to say something to this woman who he thinks he knows, but of whom he probably knows almost nothing.

"Your husband looks cold."

Confusion flits across her face first. Then she laughs, touching Gil lightly on the arm and taking the boxes from him. He prefers to wait outside, she tells him, as if he does not already know, and yes he's probably right about Rod being cold, so she should really get going, and then with a wave and a tired smile she is gone.

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Dorin does not come today, and Gil walks out of the shop shivering. He shoves his hands into his pockets, digging out a nearly empty pack of cigarettes and a fully empty lighter. He brings a cigarette to his mouth and tosses the lighter into the street, watching impassively as it is crushed by a wayward taxi. He finds the book of matches from last night and uses one to light the cigarette, then flips it open to stare at the writing inside. _Feliks. 917-923-8653._ Gil almost expects no one to pick up, but Feliks' hurried tone assures him otherwise, telling him to wait right where he is, he'll be off work soon.

In the twenty minutes he waits, Gil kicks the grimy snow, and wonders what it would be like to grind it into Roderich's pressed coat and white scarf. Probably almost as satisfying, he decides as he glimpses a bundled-up Feliks hurrying down the block, as it would be to grind it into his bare skin.

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Translation notes:  
><strong><em>Ha rövid a kardod, toldd meg egy lépéssel<em>** - If your sword is short, lengthen it with a step. [This is a Hungarian proverb.]  
><strong><em>Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis <em>**- How glorious is it to die in arms. [This is a famous line from Virgil's Aeneid.]

[Whoever guesses who Dorin is gets cookies. Or hugs. Both?]


End file.
